Children's Books

By David Sacks

Published: March 14, 1999

ALphabetical Order
How the Alphabet Began.
By Tiphaine Samoyault.
Illustrated. Unpaged. New York:
Viking. $14.99. (Ages 9 to 12)

Two more children's books on the alphabet? Well, here's the good news: Both of these nicely illustrated offerings emphasize the alphabet's versatility, showing the letters as things to be marveled at, not just memorized. Richard Wilbur's poem ''The Disappearing Alphabet'' has fun with the way letters represent language. In a more scholarly, ambitious vein, Tiphaine Samoyault's ''Alphabetical Order'' sketches the invention and spread of alphabetic writing since ancient times and visits various alphabets, past and present.

Wilbur, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose collections for children include ''Opposites'' and ''Runaway Opposites,'' first published his alphabet poem in 1997 in The Atlantic Monthly. Here the text has been complemented by David Diaz's friendly, electric illustrations. The fantasy premise: What if individual letters began to disappear? First, words would warp and fade.

And since it is by words that we construe

The world, the world would start to vanish, too!

The implications are pursued, letter by letter, through 26 illustrated pages:

What if there were no letter A?

Cows would eat HY instead of HAY.

What's HY? It's an unheard-of diet.

And cows are happy not to try it.

Apparently ''hy'' differs from hay in substance as well as name. Elsewhere we clearly see how missing letters could alter nature:

No N? In such a state of things,

Birds would have WIGS instead of WINGS.

And:

What if there were no R? Your boat, I fear,

Would have no RUDDER, and so you couldn't steer.

The overall result is charming. Although preschoolers may be puzzled by the premise, this seems just the book to help open 5- or 7-year-olds' eyes to the possibilities of language. One criticism: Because the 26-piece format can be a bit monotonous, I wish the poet could have somehow accelerated toward the end, closing with a rollicking summary, perhaps. Instead, the poem ends, at Z, on an anticlimactic note.

Not the disappearing but the proliferating alphabet is the subject of ''Alphabetical Order: How the Alphabet Began,'' by Tiphaine Samoyault, a professor of literature and an author of children's books, who lives in France. Translated by Kathryn M. Pulver, the book seeks to answer, for grade school children, such questions as ''Do other alphabets have the same letter sounds as ours?''

The book begins with the crucial distinction between alphabetic writing and writing where each character represents a word or concept (as in Mesopotamian cuneiform or modern Chinese): ''Thousands of years ago, people wrote messages by drawing pictures or symbols that represented either things or ideas. But this didn't always work, because there were too many symbols to remember. Eventually, the people living in the areas of Syria and Arabia came up with a system of symbols that represented the sounds in their words.'' An alphabet, then, uses symbols (letters) to convey tiny sounds of language. The beauty is that you need only 20 to 30 letters, depending on the language, since letters can be combined in countless variations.

Sometime before 1000 B.C. in Phoenicia (now Lebanon), there emerged a finished list of 22 letters representing consonants. This simplicity revolutionized writing, and the Phoenician alphabet was quickly copied by other peoples. The Greeks adapted it to include vowels, thus, incidentally, readying it to fit other European languages, like Latin. The letters on the page showing ''A Family Tree of the World's Alphabets'' are from the Roman alphabet; other branches of the same global tree include the Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic and Asian Indian alphabets, covering two-thirds of modern humanity.

''Alphabetical Order'' briefly sketches this epic story, using chapters of two to six pages. The text is greatly augmented by luminous paintings of nearly 20 alphabets, including Braille, Morse code and United States Navy semaphore arm positions. As a visual catalogue, the book succeeds handsomely.

The text, however, at least in this translation, is less exciting: usually helpful but not always crystal clear. Certain concepts are introduced hurriedly or muddily -- for example, the term ''Roman alphabet'' versus other alphabets, or a reason the ancient Greek language might require vowel letters while Phoenician did not.

Still, ''Alphabetical Order'' remains a creditable work. Chock-full of facts and images to fire young imaginations, it does convey the wonder and multiplicity of the alphabet.

Photo: Detail of an illustration by David Diaz from ''The Disappearing Alphabet.''